WITH its “go deep, go national” battlecry, Converge ICT Solutions (Converge) targets to cover more households in the country for next year even as it reported continuing growth both in subscriber base and revenues for the past nine months.
Asked what would be the publicly-listed company’s priority for 2022 in a recent virtual media conference, Jesus C. Romero, Converge chief operating officer, said it is also adding “go serve” as a new facet in its new mantra.
“Go Deep means we have to add capacity. Go National means we need to continue to wire the cities where our backbone passes through,” Romero said during a recent press conference.
For his part, Converge Chief Executive Officer Dennis Anthony Uy said that the country-wide fiber backbone has been completed and that it remains focused on reaching the “underserved and unserved” consumers, adding more people to market its offerings.
“We have completed our nationwide backbone, allowing us to expand into new areas in the Visayas and Mindanao, while continuing to go deep into underserved areas in Luzon. We have also augmented our sales force so that we can serve a broader number of our people with world-class fiber broadband connectivity,” said
Converge recently reported a net income of nearly P5.2 billion at the end of September 2021, more than doubling at approximately 136-percent growth over the P2.2 billion net earnings booked in the same period last year, amid continued strong growth in its subscriber base and sustained recovery of its business segment led by small and medium enterprises.
Romero said their number of new fiber ports is now almost the same number. of ports of the largest operator which operates nationwide.
“And we are not even (operating) national,” he said.
He added that “Go Serve” includes quality of service while having value-added features of their offerings.
“This is putting color into fiber rollout because there are different facets into it,” he added. This is building more redundancy into our network so that we can achieve our strategic network imperative which is high availability,” he furthered.
As of end-September 2021, the nationwide network of Converge reached more than 9.6 million homes, allowing it to accelerate its target to cover approximately 55 percent of Filipino households to 2023, two years ahead of the original 2025 schedule announced during the Initial Public Offering last year.
With strong and continued subscriber take-up, the consolidated revenues of the Company grew by 76.4-percent year-on-year to P18.8 billion in the first nine months of 2021. Revenues from the residential business grew by 94.6-percent YOY, almost doubling to P16.4 billion during the nine-month period. Residential average monthly revenue per user (“Arpu”) remained steady at P1,346. On the other hand, Converge Business revenues grew by 8.5-percent YO, to P2.5 billion, mostly from the SME segment, continuing the reversal trend seen in the second quarter of 2021.